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The gold text is a little hard to read over your background. It would be better if it was closer to a black color. Also don't center all your text, it looks unprofessional and is hard for the eye to track. Use headings and bulleted lists for emphasis and either left align or justify your text. This means you will need more text though. It always looks like more when it is centered.

With the browser window reduced in size, the symetrical godlike image wraps down to the next line and that looks bad.

Your images do not have a transparent background. I would make them transparent. Normally not an issue, but when you use a background image like you have, it becomes evident when the browser window is not maximized. (Shrink down the window and take a look.) I am talking about the "banner" images, as well as your nav buttons.

I would change or eliminate the background image. I think it is too repetitive seeing it twice in the banner, and then again in the background.

The gold text and graphics become monotomous. I would introduce additional colors.

The main site, as well as the examples you give, are lacking complex formatting. IMHO, that is what seperates the men from the boys in web design (I am trying so hard to be a man ). What I mean is... most of your pages are centered text and graphics, spaced by &lt;BR&gt;'s. I suggest using tables for more complex and exact formatting. So no, I do not think your samples show enough variation.

I tried to access the site mid-day and evening, both times were slowwwwwww load. As the pages are simple in coding, I suspect routing or server performance as the possible problem(s).

Darkened the text colour (shame coz I liked the 'gold' - but it could be hard to see)

Removed the back image

Decentred the text

I haven't made the graphics transparent because they end up looking a lot worse around the edges unless I pump up the number of colours. Instead I've made the top three images into one (bit of a bind as it combines pictures and text so had to choose between jpg & gif). Having it as one image stops it jumping down the page when the browser isn't maximised.

I'm going to work on the sample pages now...

Don't know what the problem with the load time is - I think it's the host - may have to change (shame coz it's a freebie).

Thanks again any more advice greatly appreciated. It's better to get honest advice from people 'in the know' than friends that are just impressed that you actually got something to show up on a screen.

I am so impressed by how fast this site loads! Very easy to navigate, easy to read and find what you're looking for.

One thing I would like to see would be a portfolio of your work! If you don't have one yet, generate a few small free sites for friends or local businesses. This will help build up your site and give prospective customers and idea of what they can expect.

Other than that, I enjoyed the straightforwardness of the site, and I loved the heading graphics

Heck if you don't have any friends or small businesses to design sites for then just design a few for Acme Stores.com or some other fictitious companies and through them up on your server. This will give you practice and experience plus give potential customers something to look at. This is how artists build up their portfolios so it can work for the web as well.

Looks good. Very basic and not to flashy design. Later on you may want to add some flahy things or interactive things throughout the site. But it looks good. Nice and clear. On the contact page i dont know about centering the text. The address looks kinda cluttered. That was just a nit picky thing though Good job!

I would suggest that you make the images at the top and bottom as wide as the text in the body of the page by fixing the width of your tables to the width of the image. It looks kind of weird when i open my browser full screen, but then again I am running at 1152x864.

It all loads very fast, about 1.6 seconds per page after the initial page. I looked using Mozilla (M15), IE 5.01 and Netscape 4.08, becuase you have kept it simple it looks the same in all browsers.

I don't agree with the colour scheme being to monotenous (sp?) I think keeping it simple is the key. As for the white space the only way to fix it is tables that use percentages and that has already being discussed above, and if percentage tables are used then the liens cna become to long at higher res and difficult to read. Lines should be about 10-15 words in length.

Thanks again for the comments.
In reply to Carl Lerche:
I've changed the blue links to a brown which I hope looks better, thanks for that.

I'm sticking with the same colour scheme all through the site because I want it to be uniform.

White space - It's always a compromise - I could put more stuff in but then 800x600 would have to scroll, and the load time would go up.As Karl says I tried doing it differently and it just looked odd. As a design I like white space - I guess it's just what you prefer.

Content - I think (hope) the site does what it needs to - tells people what I do and gets them to contact me. I don't want too much info as it would get confusing.
I've been to dozens of web-designers sites researching how I should do mine, and I find that I prefer the simpler ones best.

I'm working on making better sample sites and once I have I'll bung a portfolio button on the top bar.

Thanks again for the comments - I'll keep tweaking!

Peter

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A man wrapped up in himself makes a pretty
small package.
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I looked at your "examples of site styles". They all looked very similar to me(the guitar one is different). The are all centered and seem to follow the same layout. I think that if you want to be a web designer you should be able to make different looking webpages.